With every day an April Fool, brands can't compete with reality on April 1.

It helps to be equipped with a highly developed sense of the absurd. And you can apply that all year round for campaigns to fly. Except for April 1.

'We want to do a really wacky April Fool!'

It's the client request that almost always has account teams and creatives groaning. Even worse, is when the team pitches a genuinely leftfield, provocative, funny brand concept in September and the client replies with 'Love it! Let's do it as an April fool'.

No. There's a misguided belief amongst clients that outlandish, 'Is this for real?' brand pranks are best served for one single day of the year. One would think those in marketing would understand the basics of supply and demand, differentiation and share of voice - why launch a prank style campaign on the one day of the year when every other brand on the planet is doing exactly the same thing (and one has to question how much consumer demand there is in the first place, if any).In a desperate race to get ahead for eyeballs and attention - like millions of healthy sperm to a single egg - brands are now launching April Fools in late March. The late March fool.

One thing I've always maintained as a creative is that it helps to be equipped with a highly developed sense of the absurd. It's there in my work such as Christmas Tinner, pizzas for bees, Neil Warnock's Guide to Anger Management, or Tanya Bardsley launching a personal fragrance called 'Chien' (for Missing People's sniffer dogs). A favourite campaign by another brand was the launch of 0% Guinness Clear to promote responsible drinking during the Six Nations...it was water in a Guinness glass.If a client asks for an April Fool, push back. If an absurd, prank-style idea is good enough, it will fly just about any time of the year. Except for April 1.

The real reason, I suspect, why April Fools brand work is losing whatever cache is left is because, if you pardon the pun, it's trumped by the absurdity of reality. Think of just how batshit crazy and bonkers our civil (or uncivil) society has become, starting at the very top and our efforts as creatives look weak by comparison. 

The President of the United States sharing an AI-generated clip of war-torn Gaza transformed into the Riviera of the Middle East, with himself and Netanyahu sipping cocktails, topless on sun beds? Come of it, that would never happen a million...oh, shit.

In the past weeks we've had the proposal to occupy Greenland, Ukraine starting the war with Putin, the White House lawn turned into a Tesla showroom with the President reeling off deals, putting tariffs on Canada unless it agrees to become the 51st state, and the richest man in the world - partly down to government subsidy - taking a chainsaw to health and social security benefits for the sick and the poor. Just yesterday I had to check the date on an article published in Rolling Stone reporting that the Trump administration is flexing towards a position that climate change will benefit humanity (just think of all those new beach resorts in Greenland). That's just America. The rest of the world is going batshit too.We live in absurd times. The April Fool can't compete.